Home > Consumer Reviews > Intel 80 GB X25-M MLC SSD 2.5-Inch / 7.0 mm

Purchased this drive to go in my Lenovo Ideapad U330. The performance is awesome. The drive is silent since there's no moving parts. Using a SSD also decrease the heat output and energy usage also. The computer is much cooler and uses less energy than before, thus longer battery life. Before this, I had also purchased an OCZ Core 64GB SSD to use in my new Lenovo at $280. That drive, the OCZ Core, was horrible, the performance on HD Tach was 130MB/sec which is good, but it wasn't the benchmark performance that was bad, it was real world use. To use the OCZ drive as a primary OS drive was impossible. It was plague with stops and stutters. Most of the good reviews about how SSD was so fast are from users using an SLC (single level cell) drive. Usually an OCZ SSD or a G.Skill SSD in a sivler case both of which are a rebranded Samsung drive.
This Intel drive is a MLC (multi level cell) drive but intel developed a new technology on how the drive is read and write so it does not suffer from stutters like other MLC drive. This drive performance on HD Tach was equivalent to a RAID (0): SATA WD Raptor 74GB drive at 10,000 rpm. The benchmark on the Intel: Burst speed: 194.4 MB/sec, Average read: 114.3 MB/sec, Random Access: 0.3ms. The benchmark on the Raptor was Burst speed: 197.9 MB/sec, Average read: 110.6 MB/sec and Random Access: 8.6ms. As you can see this drive improves laptop performace by quite a bit. Worth every penny.

I bought this SSD to place into a new laptop I purchased (Samsung X460). However, prior to using the new laptop I figured I would install this SSD in my old laptop first, just to see if it made a difference. It did! Vista now boots in about 15 Seconds and shuts down in about 5 seconds! No more need for hibernate mode! Word documents open immediately! Visual Studio projects that used to take 10-20 seconds to open now open in 1-2 seconds! IE opens immediately! The list goes on and on! Needless to say I'm very happy with the results so I returned the new laptop unopened and kept my money.

This drive is by far the best upgrade I have ever performed. Since installing it my laptop now runs substantially cooler. It used to get so hot in my lap but not anymore! I will never go back to spinning drives again!

The only con I can find about this drive is the storage size. It would be nice to have 120gb+ drive but as of today the larger Intel drive is simply too expensive. To be sure, there are larger drives out there from other manufacturers, but in this price range none come close to the performance of the Intel drive. However, my laptop does have an SD card reader so I slapped in a 16GB SDHC Class 6 card to help out. I use the SD card to hold my music files and other data files. It works out perfect!

Again, I highly recommend this SSD. For the price it is the fastest SSD available. The bottleneck in most computers is the hard drive. This item addresses that issue.

Performance Tips(to try): If you have enough RAM(3+GB), disable virtual memory. You can also disable pre-fetch. For further improvements, just Google "SSD Optimization Tips." Most operating systems were designed to work with spinning hard drives and some of that stuff may hinder the speed of a SSD.

I have to say that this is undoubtably the most amazing improvement that I've made in my system in as long as I can remember. The only thing that I can remember like this is the time that I bought a 3Dfx Voodoo 3D card and used it to play my first 3D accelerated game.

Vista 64 boots to the desktop in ~22 seconds from the "press any key to boot from CD" until the desktop appears. And the system is immediately responsive when the desktop appears - you can click on things and they come right up as if Vista's not busy loading a whole lot of stuff. The drive is absolutely quiet - which is a bit weird actually - but weird in a nice way. It's completely cool - in fact, it's made out of metal that feels like thick brushed aluminum and it feels cold to the touch. I'm a gamer and Warhammer launches in literally half the time that it used to and the loading sequences between zones feels much faster than it used to. Everything feels much faster than it used to. Even little programs like iTunes, and Firefox that never felt particularly slow feel like they are way faster to load and come up.

I'm upgrading from a Hitatchi 1TB Deskstar - I presume if I had a WD Raptor or Velociraptor, or some RAID0 setup that I wouldn't be so impressed. But coming off of a fairly fast single 7200rpm 1TB drive, this drive is a massive improvement


On the negatives, well, 80GB is pretty small. I had a hard time fitting my Vista Ultimate 64 directory tree, my Program Files and Program Files (x86) directories onto it with room to spare for a couple of my favorite games. I have about 7GB free. And there's still a bunch of games that are left on my "old" 1TB drive. It's supposed to be low power - but 80GB is too little for me to actually use (my photo library alone is 300GB.. the problem of RAW mode and a DSLR), so I have to keep my 1TB drive plugged in. So about the best that I can say is that it probably doesn't add a lot more power to my system. It's also extremely expensive for the capacity you get.

But aside from the small capacity and the cringingly high retail price, I am amazed at what a difference it made in my computer..

Fast boot, faster sleep and wake. Splash screens blaze by - blink and you miss them.
Increased battery life by a half hour, Cooler running. No annoying hard drive clicking! Great for multitasking and noticeable improvement in responsiveness. The most eye-opening differences are when doing program installs and in boot/sleep times.

After recently buying a Dell XPS 1530 laptop with an 8600GT graphics card, I noticed the fan noise was very annoying as was the continuous clicking from the hard drive. I like dead silence in my machines but because of many GPU heat failures and upset consumers, Dell had 'upgraded' the Bios to run the fan precisely when the CPU temps hit 55C and the GPU hit 70C to bring them back down by 10 degrees.

All set to return the laptop and get a Macbook, I delayed and installed Windows 7 64 bit beta. Wow, big speed improvement over Vista but the fans and hard drive were still annoying me.
Enter the Intel 74.5GB X25-M. It is a bit pricey but probably saves me a half hour of precious time a day, the fans run much less often, battery life is improved and there's no vibration due to the drive that I can feel while typing. Simply use an external HDD for data. Well worth it especially at the new low price!

I have a 2.5 year old Lenovo T60 which I use for +10h every day.
It has become *very slow* (did install too much crap) with Vista Ultimate and overheated frequently.
Changed to this SSD, had filesystem reindexed and virus full scan and since then: AWESOME!
I wont need a new laptop, my T60 is suddenly faster & more responsive (plus cooler, longer battery life etc...)

I predict that there will be no more harddisk in any serious business notebooks within a year. Really, you have to see it to believe it...
Intel better modify their fabs from pentiums to SSD; who needs a (barely faster) processor if you can double the speed of your old system with the SSD.